Part 56

He lifted her in his strong arms and brought her back, with her bright hair fluttering against his lips, and Van Alen, raging impotently, stood and watched him.

It seemed to him that Otto's air was almost insultingly triumphant as he set the girl on her feet and smiled down at her. And as she smiled back, Van Alen turned on his heel and left them.

Presently he heard her running after him lightly over the sodden ground.

And when she reached his side she said: "Your book was wonderful."

"But he carried you over the stream."

Her eyes flashed a question, then blazed. "There, you've come back to it," she said. "What makes you?"

"Because I wanted to carry you myself."

"Silly," she said; "any man could carry me across the stream--but only you could write that chapter in the middle of the book."

"You liked it?" he cried, radiantly.

"Like it?" she asked. "I read it once, and then I read it again--on my knees."

Her voice seemed to drop away breathless. Behind them Otto Brand tramped, whistling; but he might have been a tree, or the sky, or the distant hills, for all the thought they took of him.

"I wanted to beg your pardon," the girl went on, "for what I said the other day--it is a great thing to write a book like that--greater than fighting a battle or saving a life, for it saves people's ideals; perhaps in that way it saves their souls."

"Then I may sleep in the canopy bed?" His voice was calm, but inwardly he was much shaken by her emotion.

Her eyes, as she turned to him, had in them the dawn of that for which he had hoped.

"Why not?" she said, quickly. "You are greater than your grandfather--you are--" She stopped and laughed a little, and, in this moment of her surrender, her beauty shone like a star.

"Oh, little great man," she said, tremulously, "your head touches the skies!"

SANDWICH JANE

"No man," said O-liver Lee, "should earn more than fifteen dollars a week. After that he gets--soft."

"Soft nothing!"

O-liver sat on a box in front of the post-office. He was lean and young and without a hat. His bare head was one of the things that made him unique. The other men within doors and without wore hats--broad hats that shielded them from the California sun; or, as in the case of Atwood Jones, who came from the city, a Panama of an up-to-the-minute model.

But O-liver's blond mane waved in every passing breeze. It was only when he rode forth on his mysterious journeys that he crowned himself with a Chinese straw helmet.

Because he wore no hat his skin was tanned. He had blue eyes that twinkled and, as I have said, a blond mane.

"Fifteen dollars a week," he reaffirmed, "is enough."

Fifteen dollars was all that O-liver earned. He was secretary to an incipient oil king. As the oil king's monarchy was largely on paper he found it hard at times to compass even the fifteen dollars that went to his secretary.

The other men scorned O-liver's point of view and told him so. They were a rather prosperous bunch, all except Tommy Drew, who dealt in a dilettante fashion in insurance, and who sat at O-liver's feet and worshiped him.

It was Saturday and some of the men had drifted in from the surrounding ranches; others from the cities, from the mountains, from the valleys, from the desert, from the sea. Tinkersfield had assumed a sudden importance as an oil town. All of the men had business connected in some way with Tinkersfield. And all of them earned more than fifteen dollars a week.

Therefore they disputed O-liver's statement. "If you had a wife--" said one.

"Ah," said O-liver, "if I had--"